


A Simple Love Letter

by qalets (Qalets)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-16
Updated: 2015-02-16
Packaged: 2018-03-13 06:42:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3371624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Qalets/pseuds/qalets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Exactly what it says on the tin...</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Simple Love Letter

My best man,

I'm the first person to admit that I’m not very good at this.

The kind of person I am, you’d think I’d prefer to face things head on: my fears for example. Instead I find this blank piece of paper so much less intimating than saying this out loud. That deducing look on your face as I spoke always had the power to stop my words, even as I was about to speak them.

I've been told that there are things that I haven’t told you. Things that I should perhaps have said a long time ago. I say “I've been told” because I've never thought it myself. Others have recognised it in me but, as I think I've already said, I was never very good at that. Looking inward has never been a talent of mine; understanding myself. Calling a spade a spade. Or a lover.

So, spade, these are the things I haven’t told you:

I haven’t told you about how it feels to stand by your side.

I haven’t told you of what I see when I hear your name: my battlefield high, my adrenaline rush, my once-lost thrill.

I haven’t told you how it feels to look at you across a room. The shattering recognition of everything I admire.

But, already, I’m falling into sentiment, I’m promised myself I wouldn't. You hate that.

 

Before you I lived my life in neutral shades: khaki and concrete, sand and rust. I thought I was happy for a time; moving from one battlezone to the next. I found the comrades I needed, saw my niche and settled there. For a time. I did what was expected of me.

I couldn't have seen that life ending like it did. I couldn't have thought that I’d end up here. With you.

I was so alone.

I owe you so much.

If I hadn't met you in the lab that day would I have gone back? To that place I still craved in each breath? Would I have grown tired of not knowing who I was? That world may have been dangerous, but at least I understood myself when I was part of it. 

But I’ll never know the answers to those questions.

It was at my lowest point, when the hues seemed to have completely bled from my life, that I met you. All it took was an alarming number in my bank account, a chance meeting with an old acquaintance and a closed off figure across a lab bench. You were so careful not to give anything away. I’m sure I had my heart pinned to my sleeve. Like a rank.

And all at once, deductions and introductions and you were part of my life. In some ways the part I’d always been missing. That’s another thing I haven’t told you.

So why am I writing this letter? Because I know you. Because I understand you and adore you and am terrified of you. But perhaps I am more terrified of who I am when I’m with you. Saying these words out loud would make them real, writing them down on paper makes them live. I’m not sure that I will ever send this.

I can’t tell you that from the moment I first met you that I understood that we were part of a whole. That you were the head to my heart; stoic and strong, logical, occasionally to a fault. It must seem obvious but it took me a long time to recognise that in the two of us. It took me longer to recognise that in myself: I’d always thought I was the one who lived in the head. The way I was raised, the choices I made in my life, they were based on that assumption, the heart didn't come into it. I believed in my head; logic and reason, but once I knew you I realised I was only pale imitation of those qualities. I could never match up to the way you inhabit them.

So now I have lost you. Lost you to your head. Whether it was to protect me or to protect yourself, they were the choices you felt you needed to make. I will never understand them. I will try. But I was never very good at that. You were always the one who could understand a person with only a look.

I haven’t told you how much I miss that look.

I haven’t told you about the warmth of your touch, how lost I'm without it. Like pining for home.

I haven’t told you enough about how it feels to be me. Seeing you. You are beauty to me. 

 

But I know you. 

I know that by now you will have tired of this. Too messy an emotion to be out in the open, to be named and identified and qualified.

If we had been having this conversation out loud you would have retreated into yourself long before now. I would have made us tea. Tried to coax you back into the room from that place inside your head. You would have stopped talking, falling over that desire to hold things down, hold things back. Perhaps I would have retreated at your silence, stepped away from you and out into the welcome of London instead. Stopped the tide of things I haven’t told you.

Perhaps I would have stopped before I told you that I love you.

I haven’t told you that I love you.

I haven’t told you that there is nothing that could stop me loving you.

Certainly not disagreements over experiments in the fridge, or cold cups of tea or the violin at 3am.

I miss all those things.

I haven’t told you to come back to me. Not so you could hear me.

I haven’t told you to do the impossible: unmake a decision, forgo the plunge. You didn’t do it because you wanted to save me. You did it because you were frightened. You were frightened of these words. Frightened of what these words meant.

I haven’t told you that because you wouldn’t want to hear it. It’s hard, hearing things like that.

But that is cruel of me. I’m making a hash of this.

 

I’m not sure I ever expected that I would be the kind of person to write a love letter (and that is what this is, there’s no use anymore in saying otherwise). I don’t think anyone would expect from looking at me that I would be that kind of person either. I’ve always done that in my life- attempted to live up to the expectations others create for me. It’s time that I stopped. Became the expectations I set for myself. That is what this letter is. A new start.

Another new start for that matter.

I haven’t told you that I came back to life for you. From the greyness, the time before. You made me do that. I should thank you.

I haven’t told you: thank you.

Not enough, not out loud. Not with emphasis enough, to show you how much I really mean it. Perhaps that simply isn’t possible.

You brought me back to life. Reinvented me. Took me out of my head and made me the heart.

I haven’t told you all these things.

 

And now you’re married, I don’t think I ever will.

SH

**Author's Note:**

> So I really hope you understood what I was trying to do here and didn’t scroll down to the bottom before you read the whole letter. I toyed with the idea of putting a comment at the top forbidding you to do so, but that would have set everyone’s alarm bells ringing. Please please PLEASE let me know if this worked, or if it’s just a load of useless drivel and I should take it down… Constructive criticism welcome, hell, even deconstructive criticism. As much as you can throw my way. Please. I don’t have a beta or a buddy, you are the only way I’ll learn!
> 
> This was an idea I couldn’t shake since I read this post by the phenomenal Loudest Subtext in Television: http://loudest-subtext-in-television.tumblr.com/post/99951586364/the-head-and-the-heart-we-got-it-wrong and even if it was really just a writing exercise, I wanted to get something posted.


End file.
